The crumpled hope of a less enlightened age

They thought if they wrote lies,
elegantly, with proper grammar,
we would believe,
as though words age off their impurities
and never ferment in the unsaid.
Even their truths have turned wolfish,
a wolf that lacks the grace of nature,
no pack, no play, no haunted howls,
just laws bearing fangs that drip froth
and mangey rituals caked with blood.
"This is a thing diseased," we write in the margins,
"pathetic. What a wonder they could stand themselves.
Yet we musn't judge. We have progressed."